Knierim grew up in a family household deeply involved in the communal life of their local Methodist congregation, where his paternal grandmother had been a founding member.
In his essay "On the Subject of War in Old Testament and Biblical Theology," originally published in German, Knierim describes the experience of his own forcible conscription into the German military, alongside the parallel experience of his friend and fellow Old Testament scholar, Hans Eberhard von Waldow, stating that, “These experiences, followed by the impact of the Holocaust, or Shoah, profoundly influenced the direction of our lives, including our commitment to Old Testament studies.” [10] In March 1945, after a war-battered Pirmasens had undergone severe structural damage and numerous casualties among its citizenry, Knierim was captured by American forces, interrogated, but then sent home.
Surviving years of hunger pervasive in the still war-involved region at the time, Knierim completed his schooling at the Pirmasens Humanistisches Gymnasium, and passed final exams, earning his diploma in the summer of 1948.
In Heidelberg, Knierim shared a room with Manfred Hoffmann, who went on to later become professor of church history at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
While there, Knierim published a reflection in the church newsletter addressing his congregation entitled, "Biblishes Denken" [biblical thinking], a piece he mentions in the foreword of his 1995 book, The Task of Old Testament Theology: Substance, Method, and Cases.
There, years later in the opening of the 1995 book, one of the culminating works of his career, he noted that although he had become “involved in the scholarly side of the task” in his professional life over the decades that followed his pastoral service, a view had persisted for him through the years, namely that he had ”never believed that biblical thinking is reserved only for the scholars.”[11] Knierim and his family moved to Saarbrücken in 1956 where he was assigned a small congregation to pastor, and he worked on his doctoral dissertation at the invitation of Gerhard von Rad, his mentor.
[5] Knierim's Festschrift included contributions from scholars such as Klaus Koch, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Rolf Rendtorff, James A. Sanders, and Claus Westermann.
On September 29, 2018, Knierim and his wife, Hildegard, were killed in a car accident near Winslow, Arizona [1] while returning home to Claremont from a vacation in New Mexico.
[12] As a former student of Gerhard von Rad, a noted German scholar of the form-critical method, Knierim was regarded as being especially well-positioned to bring continental formgeschichte to the United States.
Enlisting a global team of researchers, the Forms of the Old Testament Literature (FOTL) series carried forth the form-critical discipline developed over several generations by German biblical scholars as its volumes also evidenced new developments, for instance a departure from a characteristic pre-World War II exegetical focus preoccupied nearly exclusively with diachronic concerns, to a more synchronic one, moving the field well beyond its previously prioritized analytic parameters.
This requires that the Old Testament be interviewed first of all for its actual, ostensible meaning within its ancient context, and only then put to analogous use in addressing the problems of contemporary human life.”[23] Knierim's rigorous pedagogy, intense presence, and intellectually engaging approach to mentorship found expression in the classroom and in his fulfillment of the role of Doktorvater.
[9][12] A few of Knierim's doctoral dissertation advisees included: Kent Harold Richards,[24] SBL Executive Director Emeritus,[25] Antony F. Campbell,[26] George Blankenbaker,[27] Marvin A. Sweeney,[28] Yoshihide Suzuki,[29] recipient of the 1990 Japan Academy Prize for his dissertation-based work, "A Philological Study of Deuteronomy," [30] and Mignon R. Jacobs,[31] Dean and Professor of Old Testament at Ashland Theological Seminary.
Two dissertations completed by Knierim doctoral advisees featured discussions that specifically treated the place of Knierim's work in the development of the disciplines of biblical criticism in general, and form criticism, exegetical methodology, Old Testament theology and hermeneutics in particular: David Bruce Palmer's Text and Concept in Exodus 1:1-2:25: A Case Study in Exegetical Method,[32] and Wonil Kim's Toward a Substance-Critical Task of Old Testament Theology.
Knierim's methodology is cast against the trajectory of OT theology and hermeneutics that has subscribed to one principal interpretive tenet since Pietism and Gabler...Heilsgeschichte as a representative interpretive mode of this trajectory is traced from its Pietistic origin to its full development by von Rad.”[36] Knierim's approach was thus described by Kim as representing a departure and a paradigmatic shift into a new and decidedly different direction from even his well-known mentor, Gerhard von Rad.